Some of our more, ahem, mature readers may remember that back in the mid-
Sorry about that. The contest entries were in fact judged by the editorial board, but a dispute between Pulju (a Givónian functionalist) and Slater (a Lasnikian generativist) turned uncivil and the winners were never announced. In the meantime, we have lost our records as to who submitted them. So no prizes this time! But we do remember which category each was submitted for.
Less than three full decades late, we are proud to present the third installment, the winners from 1987!
It seems to me to be the case that the night, was stormy and dark.
We set forth, reader
— nay, we embark! — for both birch and beech will frame our tale with naught to bell it — into the very morning of the world, the world of the text, the text of the world of my dissertation, which will wreak analysis upon the transcribed discourse of the Community Arbor Fund budget meeting of Nov. 12th and bind it, helpless and qualitative, to the loom of my desires.
The subtle green glow of the mushrooms hinted at the presence of prefixies, the barely audible hum of isogloss lines suggested the likelihood of suffixies
— and any linguofairyologist worth her salt would know that infixies are always around — but the faint, crisp, metathesistic aroma of elberderries gave Lady Hattie Mattie Nettie Bettie Bertie Gertie Le Feuvre (known to her close friends and associates as “Mad Hattie”) an inkling that she would soon come across a precious circumfixie, the rarest of the rare affixies to be found in a proper British garden of languages, of which hers was surely and assuredly the most proper, the most British, and the most linguistic.
Tex snapped his spurs sharply into the side of his sorrel steed, squinted through the setting sun’s slanting shafts, steadied his six-
shooter, and shot a salvo of silver shells into the side of the scoundrel, Sibilant Sam.
Admiral Waiz gazed thoughtfully at the blue-
green moon of Rugai IV, which loomed placidly off the port bow of the Galaxy Streamer; his mind flitted briefly between his ship’s damaged anti- ergative drive and his crew’s raging epidemic of procliticitis, before settling with determination on the larger problem at hand: how to locate and diffuse the ambifixation detonator which an unknown malefactor had concealed somewhere on either side of the moon that lay defenseless before him.
As the notebook was torn from my hands and punishing blows rained down on my head, all I could think was, “Okay, it must be an ergative language.”
As the local population brandished weapons and charged straight at his team of fieldworkers, Dr. Harfleswatte realized, belatedly, that perhaps extreme breathy voice and velar relaxation in Tkovzari was actually phonemic, and that the Tkovzari leader’s opening [huuzawıdḷ kjutiiii? uuwar! yežjuu!] might not have been as unthreatening as he originally imagined.
No-one expects the Spanish infixation.
It was the adverb of time; it was the deixis of time; it was the age of well-
formedness; it was the age of formalism; it was the epoch of syntax; it was the epoch of semantics; it was the season of the Syllable of Light; it was the season of the Lateral of Darkness; it was the spring of apocope; it was the winter of the minimal pair; we had everything before us; we had nothing before us; we were all going direct to Tenure; we were all going direct the other way; in short, the semicolon was so far like the present semicolon, that some of its noisiest prescriptivists insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Ðor, broad-
shouldered and red- bearded, strode mightily through Vowelhalla in search of his step- mother — the comely and proper goddess of minced oaths, Fryggyn’ — to warn her that Lowki was up to his old tricks again and had threatened to poison the Well of Phonemes, and hence Ŷĝĝḓřấŝíìλ, with a flood of falling tones — but Ðor could not, as he was brought up short as the main hall filled instantly with the spirits of innumerable schwas, recently reduced and brought to Vowelhalla by the Vowelkyries; thinking of Fryggyn’, he stifled most of his displeasure and swore but gently, “ᚠᚢᛞᚷᛖ!”
It was 8.02am and 50.53555 seconds and Dr John Littledata was alarmed that the manual of his electronic alarm had a low type/
token ratio — the mark of a lack of interaction with cognitive linguists.
The minimalist awoke.
Minimalists wake.
Minnie woke.
Min’s up!
The sky above the port was the color of colorless green ideas, mapped to a dead theory.
No one would have believed, in the opening years of the twenty-
first century, that the world of discourse was being analyzed keenly and closely by algorithms faster than any thought of man and yet as fallible; that as men busied themselves about their various communications they were being scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
Satirical linguistics wasn’t quite the last great frontier that Trey once thought it was; in fact, it was more like the first pair of unstarched lederhosen out of the broken washing machine.
Today, we code anthropological linguistic data; tomorrow, we take over the world.
Jim Jimminy wasn’t just a translation scholar; he was a mime too.
During the past twenty-
five years of development in the field of linguistics it has become customary, especially among anthropologists, to regard linguistics as a very advanced, systematic, precise, powerful — in short, ‘scientific’ discipline.
It was a long and stormy dissertation defense; Assistant Professor Higenby, chair of the committee, opportunistically filled pauses with softball questions to her student, while Professors Alsop and Hughes huddled together at the lower end of the conference table, concocting arcane and patently irrelevant questions about evidence for “traces” left by “raising to subject” in Bantu languages, clearly designed to undermine the candidate’s academic credibility (another salvo in their strategy to deny Higenby tenure), and Assistant Professor Bingham, whose first three comments lent the strong impression that he had not even read the dissertation, asserted shrilly that the candidate’s work, added to that of Higenby herself, had proven “nothing at all;” and just as Professor Smyth, an external committee member from Religious Studies who had been hastily added at the last minute, tried to make peace by rising to ask why it didn’t count for at least something that the candidate for a Doctorate in Linguistics could already speak five languages fluently, a precocious undergraduate passed me a note which read: “quarrels in academia are all the more bitter for their triviality.”